Cut Your Bat In Two Pieces: What Alex Colomé Brings To The Twins

Here was an arm capable of throwing in the mid-90s but favored his biting cutter at a near 3-to-1 pace.

Targeting pitchers who have a hard-to-handle non-fastball makes sense as a strategy. From 2010 to 2019, relievers had an expected FIP of 4.83 on all types of fastballs. Opponents posted a .342 weighted on-base average. On breaking balls, on the other hand, relievers had a 2.45 expected FIP and a much more benign .254 weighted on-base average.

Theoretically, if some is good then more is probably better. In 2020, the Minnesota Twins put it into practice. Only the Houston Astros bullpen threw more non-fastballs than the Twins’ did.

The Twins bullpen finished the season with a 3.97 expected FIP, the third lowest in baseball, and a 3.62 ERA, the sixth best. The Astros did not fare as well and that might have to do with the weapon of choice. While the Astros favored curveballs, the Twins embraced sliders.

The proliferation of the slider use in Minnesota may have something to do with the Twins’ top pitching analyst.

Way back in 2008 when the internet ran on coal, Josh Kalk studied pitch f/x data and found that sliders had been more effective than curveballs. He theorized at the time that the curveball’s hump, the point in which the pitch jumps up out of a tunnel, gives the hitter advanced warning that something is amiss. Sliders, meanwhile, demonstrated later break, tending to tunnel with fastballs better and don’t tip off the hitters.

Sliders, it seemed, were better than curveballs. The organization embraced this principle.

For existing pitchers like Tyler Duffey, Taylor Rogers, and Trevor May, the Twins helped them reshape their curveballs, reducing the amount of tunnel-jump displayed and creating more late break. This has led to more favorable results. On the acquisition side, it means targeting pitchers whose sliders or cutters have outstanding movement but possibly have been underutilized (Matt Wisler).

Minnesota’s relief corp threw sliders as 34% of their mix — more than any team besides the Reds.

Naturally, a lot of those sliders came from Matt Wisler and Sergio Romo. But even pitchers like Jorge Alcala, another right-hander with a high powered arm, threw his slider at a very high rate.

Now with Wisler gone, the Twins can have Colomé slide into the nothing but breaking balls role.

He doesn’t throw a slider like Wisler but his cutter behaves like a souped up slider. To understand how his particular pitch moves, consider the active spin of the pitch -- the amount of spin that contributes to its movement.

A fastball that has 100% active spin, if thrown with a 12:00 tilt, will have perfect backspin. A curveball with similar traits, such as Rich Hill’s bender, will have just the opposite -- a topspin ball with 12-6 break. The lower the active spin rate on a pitch, the more gyro spin is present (spin that doesn’t contribute to movement) and the more gravity affects the direction of the pitch (i.e. down).

Cutters, when they are close to the cut fastball variety, have a high active spin rate. The reigning cutter king, Kanley Jansen, has a nice active spin of 69 on his. This means it has a lot of useful spin, similar to a fastball, but with enough gyro spin to make it drop some. Also, at over 2,500 RPMs on average, Jansen’s cutter is rotating enough on the way to the plate to result in that big horizontal run.

But there are cutters that blend into the slider movement category. Sliders typically have active spin between the 10-30% range (although the frisbee kind tends to be higher). That’s where Colomé’s cutter lands. His cutter ranges from 35-40% in active spin rate, meaning that it can have similar spin properties as a slider even though it is thrown near 90 mph.

Colomé’s cutter (2,100 RPMs) does not have the overall spin rate like Jansen’s so it doesn’t generate the massive east-west movement but with the lower active spin rate, gravity helps it drop more than his Dodger counterpart.

More importantly for Colomé than overall total movement is the way the cutter hides in the same tunnel as his fastball, breaking off late.

This is the average movement path of Colomé’s fastball (red) and cutter (brown). The dots represent the release point, the recognition point, and the commitment point (pink dots). The fastball and cutter share the same path until after the commitment point. Essentially, this is doing exactly what Kalk’s research over a decade ago found to be so enticing. Hitters are given no hints about the pitch until after they have made their move to swing.

“As we know, the later the movement, the better the pitch,” Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson told reporters in 2020. “I should say, the better the chance you have for more swings and misses.”

Johnson was talking about Wisler’s slider but the same could be said about Colome’s cutter.

We say that Colomé’s cutter tunnels off his fastball but given that the cutter is his primary pitch, it’s really his fastball that gives the hitter a different look.

The fastball spins up to the plate with a 12:15 tilt (and 96% active spin) providing him with a good amount of carry or ride. While the cutter darts down, the fastball just keeps going. As a hitter, you have to decide with little early indication which pitch is coming and either have to account for the fastball’s carry or the cutter’s drop.

This combination and execution explains why hitters struggled so much to put anything in the air against him.

After posting fly ball rates of 22%, 22% and 25% in 2017-2019, opponents were able to lift the ball on just 9% of balls in play. And, after a year in 2019 when he was barreled (hard hit at optimal launch angles) by opponents at a 9% rate, he rebounded and allowed barreled contact on just 3% of balls in play, putting him in the top 5% of the league, in 2020.

What made 2020 so different from the previous seasons? One adjustment that benefited him last year was his tendency to stay out of the strike zone.

In 2016, he struck out 31% of batters faced. That rate has steadily declined each season since. During his first year with the White Sox, he told reporters that the reason this happened was because he had switched his focus from strikeouts to getting hitters out in three pitches or less. This meant more contact in the zone and more balls in play.

However, over the last two seasons Colomé has started to pitch off the plate more.

In 2016-2018, his zone rate on all his pitches was near or above 50%. This past year, his zone rate was down to 41%.

Most notably, he began to locate his cutter more underneath the zone (one reason why opponents were now hitting the top of the ball and worm-burning the infield around him). After locating the cutter in the zone at a 50% rate, he was down to 37% in 2020. Hitters were still making contact but now they were chopping the top of the ball.

If he continues to produce the same amount of grounders, it’s likely he will enjoy pitching in front of the Twins’ defense.

Overall, the 2020 season was a step forward for Colomé but there are some areas that the Twins could tweak.

Colomé has recently improved his fastball’s vertical carry. While with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2016, his vertical movement on his fastball was 11.5 inches. This past season it was at 13.5. The added 2 inches is notable considering it provides separation from his cutter.

Interestingly, even as he was improving the carry on his fastball, Colomé targeted the top of the zone less in 2020.

In 2018, he threw his fastball in the upper half of the strike zone 63% of the time but did so only 47% of the time in 2020. When he did locate up, opponents had a much more difficult time making solid contact (83.3 exit velocity) compared to when he would pitch to the bottom of the zone (93.8 exit velocity).

It’s possible that the Twins could have him set his sights higher with his fastball in 2021.

If he can keep that same tunnel effect while increasing the amount of separation between where the pitches end up, Colomé has the potential to miss more bats next year.

There is the inherent risk of overvaluing performance in the shortened season. After all, most of the data above is from 22.1 innings. That’s hardly a sampling. Still, the Twins haven’t had too many misses when it comes to pitching acquisitions. They have a good process for identifying talent, undoubtedly diving into motion data for Colomé to see if 2020’s success is based on anything mechanical, and they have a strong system in place to fully develop their potential, either by optimizing an arsenal or by tweaking their motion. There’s a healthy combination of front office nerds and grizzled road-worn coaches reaching this conclusion.

Even if they don’t do anything with him and he regresses some, Alex Colomé is still a very good late innings relief option at a reasonable cost.